Zotero for Legal Research: Citations and Bibliographies

Once you have saved items to your Zotero Library, you can insert citations to those sources and automatically generate a bibliography in any document. 

The easiest way to do this is through the Zotero plugin for Microsoft Word, LibreOffice or GoogleDocs. See the Installation page for further instructions.

You can use the Zotero plugin to add citations to your document as you write:

1. Make sure the McGill Guide is selected as your preferred Citation Style in the Document Preferences window.
2. Select Insert Citation to pull up the Zotero insert bar:
3. Use author or title keywords to select the item(s) you wish to cite. You can also browse your library by clicking on the arrow beside the Zotero logo.
4. Click on your selected item again to bring up options for inserting pinpoint citations (e.g. page, section or paragraph numbers).
5. Hit enter to insert the citation into your document.
6. Check to ensure the citation is correct. If not, you may need to edit the information in your Zotero library or manually edit the citation from your document.

Once you have inserted citations, you may want to create a bibliography or Table of Authorities. Select Insert Bibliography to automatically generate a bibliography based on the sources you have cited in the document. This bibliography will automatically update to include any new citations you add later in the main text of the document. 

According to the McGill Guide, you should divide your bibliography into sections (Legislation, Jurisprudence and Secondary Materials). You can manually edit these headings into your bibliography and rearrange the entries accordingly. Note: Any manual changes you make to your bibliography will disappear if you refresh or add additional in-text citations to the main text, so you should do this as the last step in finalizing your references.

Check out Zotero's Support page for more tips and tutorials. 

York University Library's Zotero guide has additional information that is not discipline-specific. 

You can use the Document Preferences button in Word to change the citation style for your entire document at any time. One click will change all citations (and any bibliography) in your document.

Note: Any citations that you have manually edited will not update automatically, so be sure to review all citations as you are finalizing the document.